Chapter 32
Before Leon could pull the trigger in one final, desperate act of survival, there was a shout up above him. But he barely heard it, because just then, the monster that used to be Sherry’s father roared and leaped at him to deliver the killing blow.
There was a muffled whump and a streak of smoke from up to his left, and then something shot down toward the monster. Leon turned to shield himself and was knocked off his feet by the explosion. There was a flash of fire and a spray of gore as the monster was blown back, smashing against the nearby train cars. Leon landed on his side and covered his face with his hands as chunks of tissue and bits of flesh splattered around him. After a few moments, he looked back at Claire and Sherry, who were staring at the carnage in abject disbelief.
“Leon!” came a shout above him again.
He managed to look up toward the offices on the opposite side of the hangar platform. Up on the second story, standing at the top of the metal staircase, was none other than Ada, her grenade launcher in her hands.
“Ada?” Leon wondered aloud.
“Here!” she shouted, throwing something down toward him. It bounced along the floor and slid right beside him, and he was so dazed that he didn’t even realize what it was at first. There were two keys on a key ring, with a plain red tag with #2 marked on it.
He tried to respond, but the monster slumped upright and turned to face him. Half of its body was a gaping, festering sore, a grisly, exposed mass of bleeding muscle and tissue. The huge, overgrown arm with the eyeball was gone, blown off in the blast, leaving just the unbalanced torso and shrunken head, which glared at him with two bright black eyes.
The creature shuddered, and with a grotesque, nauseating twist of flesh, its torso folded over backwards. The front of its body split open like a gutted deer, a horizontal gash opening up across its chest. White splinters erupted from the exposed flesh, which at first, Leon thought were broken bits of ribs. But he was wrong. They weren’t ribs.
They were teeth.
With a nightmarish, rumbling howl, the creature seemed to double in size in mere moments, its body opening up like a huge, hungry mouth, and when Leon stared down the jagged gullet, he felt as if he was looking into a black hole.
From the grisly shoulder wound, writhing tentacles sprouted and flailed, splashing slime and pink fluid. What was left of the creature’s legs disappeared in a mass of bulging tissue that sprouted thick, bloody horns and spikes.
Leon scrambled backwards as the spikes and wriggling tentacles came close. He snatched up the car keys and tried to regain his footing, but his boots slipped in the blood splashed all over the platform.
“Get out of there!” Ada shouted to them. “Just go!”
“Shoot it!” Claire shrieked.
“You have to get out of there!” Ada shouted back, pointing at them urgently.
Leon glanced up as the creature continued to grow, its gigantic mouth spreading apart, a long red tongue whipping around inside. More tentacles sprouted from its back and slapped down on the platform, smashing the wooded boards. Two seeping yellow eyeballs formed on the creature’s disfigured body, but they swirled around, unable to focus.
To Leon’s right were the train cars parked in the hangar. There were several regular shipping containers, but also three white tanker cars. At first, Leon thought that they were full of chemicals or water or some other liquid, but then he actually looked at the large red warning label plastered on the side of the tankers.
They were full of propane. Three huge tankers of propane.
Ada snapped open the grenade launcher and dropped her final grenade into the chamber.
Like a slap to the face, Leon realized what she was planning to do.
He found his footing and grabbed Sherry, who lay motionless on the floor. He hoisted her up onto his shoulder and grabbed at Claire’s arm. Together, they ran from the hangar, a surge of adrenaline coursing through their veins.
The monster shot out its tongue and it slapped down on the edge of the platform, just a few feet from them. It let out a gurgling, choking roar and inched its way forward, tentacles wavering and trembling like tree branches in a wind storm.
Ada clicked the launcher closed and stepped back from the railing. She took a deep breath and stretched out her arm, aiming the launcher down at the platform below.
Leon and Claire ran across the train tracks outside, gasping for breath, their bodies using up their last reserves of energy. Sherry’s body was limp on Leon’s shoulder, as heavy and cumbersome as a bag of grain. He gasped with the effort of carrying her.
The monster continued down the platform, shrieking and screeching insanely, its body growing and mutating at an exponential rate. It convulsed and throbbed and spasmed, the mutations spreading out of control.
Ada pressed the trigger. Even as the grenade shot from the barrel, she was already letting go of the weapon, turning on her heel, and bolting down the short hallway behind her. The grenade whistled downward like a meteor.
Concrete barriers lined one edge of the train yard. Claire ran over to them but Leon fell behind. She cried for him to hurry up.
The monster’s turned one slimy yellow eyeball toward the oncoming grenade and let out one last shriek of defiance as it struck a few feet over its head.
Ada braced herself and leaped through a dirty window at the end of the short hallway. She flew out into the air, a final prayer on her lips.
The grenade struck one of the propane tankers and exploded. The tanker erupted like a volcano and then burst apart like a popped balloon, the sound of the explosion loud enough to be heard all over the city. There was a white-hot point of light at the center of the blast, and then an expanding wall of fire. The other tankers exploded a split second later.
The entire hangar exploded in one sudden, earth-shattering burst of flame and heat, like a toy model blown up with a stick of dynamite. The entire building disintegrated like a sand castle, the shockwave blasting it to pieces, shooting flaming debris in every direction. An enormous fireball lifted up into the sky and swirled into a towering black mushroom cloud. The sound was like the heaven’s splitting open, a deafening thunder-clap in their ears.
The shockwave threw Leon and Sherry to the ground, where they collapsed like toppled mannequins. Claire was knocked backwards, the wind knocked out of her by the force of the blast. Dirt and debris flew across the ground, pushed by the shockwave, and a scorching wave of heat burned Claire’s eyes as she tried to stand back up. She gasped for breath, as if the explosion had sucked all the oxygen out of the air.
Timber and metal rained down across the entire train yard, scraps of flaming debris and smoldering wreckage. Where the hangar once stood, there was only a flaming pit and a column of flame and smoke rising into the night sky.